This question is addressed to any member of this community.
If you were to write a brief note to your younger self, with the intent to make a better experience of learning to code in Elisp, what it would be?
Mine would be:
do not try to learn by reading the tutorials from cover to cover. You will be bored out of your mind and learn nothing. It would be like learning to drive by reading the car’s owner manual.
I found that by reading other people code before going to the manual, even with 0% understanding, is a better way to bootstrap the process. What it counts I think is the effort to read code. It anchors the brain to something practical. In a sense, it would be like studying physics by going to the exercise section first, and after having read them, the brain is better primed to absorb the material in the the chapter.
I thank you in advance for any advice in this matter.
If you know the basics of programming, not a particular language I mean but just the logic of programming like variables, functions, conditionals and loops, then you can dive into Elisp very quickly. GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is the most authoritative and complete guide out there. Just make a habit of consulting it whenever you have questions. It’s really the best existing source of reference and also available from within Emacs. Of course, studying other people’s code is an essential part of learning experience.
If you don’t have any programming experience, then you will anyway need some kind of tutorial in programming. The Elisp manual and scarcely available Elisp tutorials are definitely not the best options in this case. I would recommend Python or C-based Computer Science online courses such as those offered on the edX platform. For example, Computational Thinking using Python and CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science are excellent introductions into programming. Take both. Remember, your task is not to “learn to code in Elisp”, your task is to learn the logic of programming. This inevitably requires commitment and investments. At least those of time: don’t expect to learn the basics of programming in a couple of days; 6 months is a more realistic time frame. If you can afford 100-200$ on the aforementioned courses to get the full learning experience, the deal is worth it. By taking a good online course such as one of those from edX (Coursera is another good option) you will learn more quickly than on your own, and you won’t miss some essential parts of the whole picture. You’ll be less prone to adopting poor practices and will learn to think bigger.